Tag Archives: coming of age

It’s the late 80s and competent, attractive nurse Maryanne is back living at her mother’s Sydney home along with her two children. We know that something must have gone horribly wrong in her marriage to Roy, but when he shows up, hat in hand, all humble and hopeful and tells Maryanne about this bargain of a house he’s found on the coast… she decides to go back to him. Maryanne’s mother doesn’t mince her words and neither does she tamper down her feelings. Meanwhile 14-year-old Freya isn’t thrilled to be leaving while 8 year-old Daniel just goes with the flow.

The house in Newcastle is a disappointment. Gutted after a fire started by squatters, the family have to camp out in a few rooms while Roy slowly restores the house. Maryanne gets a job at the hospital and so the family’s routine falls back into place, There’s a surge of sexual energy between Maryanne and Roy but there’s also underlying violence, and in the case of Maryanne and her husband, the two go hand in hand….

She’d always thought, always believed that if somehow they could learn how to handle it, then everything would fall into place, and all the risks and hardships would have been worth it.

While Maryanne comes to terms with the idea that it was a terrible mistake to return to Roy, Freya begins to run wild in Newcastle, and she makes friends with a local boy named Josh, an equally lost soul. Josh is one of several secondary characters whose lives collide with Freya and Maryanne; these are people who know that there’s something wrong in the household, but they can only offer limited help–in Josh’s case his help is limited by his own youth and inexperience. There’s also Maryanne’s neighbour who can only acknowledge and advise.

The scenes between Maryanne and Roy are chillingly real with escalating violence that will end one of two ways: violent sex or just plain violence. It’s a routine with an outcome which will be decided by Maryanne’s compliance. She knows shortly after she moves to Newcastle that she’s made a horrible mistake, that Roy hasn’t changed, will never change, and yet living back home with her mother was also an acknowledgement of defeat, “every conversation was loaded with allusions to Maryanne’s past failures-the drip, drip, drip of her commentary.” Living back at home with her mother had its own set of problems:

She’d stand and stare out at the streetlight half hidden by the leaves of the tree outside, listening to the formless roar of traffic on distant roads, trapped in her childhood bedroom like she was caught in some perverse winding back of her own life.

It was terrifying, that sense of hurtling backwards. Sixteen years since that room had been hers. Sixteen years, and now here she was again, all of the struggle and failure behind her. The posters were gone, but her bed remained, and her desk, and there was still a bookcase beside the desk, though the books on it were no longer hers. The memories here were like a smell that you only noticed when you first came in.

This novel is a slow burner; the threat of violence permeates almost every page. Roy must be ‘jollied’ away from his obsessive controlling jealousy, and although it’s something the whole family understands, it’s never talked about. And while Maryanne tries, courageously (and misguidedly) to hold things together, in “the strange mixture of hope and suffering with which she lived her life, how she never gave up in anything even when it hurt her,” Freya encounters undercurrents of violence from young males at school.

It’s an interesting decision on the author’s part to make Freya the novel’s central character. Maryanne’s choices have already been made, but Freya’s path has yet to be determined. The Restorer, a haunting, troubling story, is essentially about male-female relationships and how violence can become an integral, toxic, component. In one of the saddest moments of this novel, there’s a moment when Freya, unobserved sees her mother at work:

There was something about Mum, her posture her voice, that same strangeness from before, when they’d walked together to her work. Like she was wearing a disguise-not now, but when she was home. Mum looked unburdened, younger, stronger.

I puzzled a bit over the title of Michael Salas’s book: The Restorer. On one level the restorer is Roy, a man who is restoring his house and supposedly his marriage, and yet far deeper than that, the restorer is a mechanism by which Freya will move beyond male-female violence, rejecting her parents’ model.